This board is a composition workshop, like a writers' workshop: post your work with questions about style or vocabulary, comment on other people's work, post composition challenges on some topic or form, or just dazzle us with your inventive use of galliambics.

As you may know, the Textkit forum is going through a bit of a slump. So in an effort to liven it up, I propose we do the following:

1. Pick out a news article that fascinates you and that you are sure will pique others' interests.
2. Translate it to Latin or Greek, either in full or partially. Don't worry about the grammar, because you will put it in the Composition Board, where others will help you polish the work.
3. Once it is finished, and if you have time to debate the article or the events reported therein, post it in the Agora.

Corrections are most welcome. You are also encouraged to translate the rest of the article.

U.N. action on Kosovo called off because of Moscow

By Evelyn LeopoldFri Jul 20, 12:43 PM ET

The United States and Europeans discarded on Friday their U.N. Security Council resolution on Kosovo's future status because of Russian opposition.

Moscow fears the complicated European-American sponsored draft resolution would lead to independence for the breakaway province from Serbia. Belgrade opposes this.

Instead, the Western nations would try to initiate negotiations between the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo through the Contact Group of advisors on the Balkans, composed of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, the United States and Russia. But no country has veto rights.

"We regret ... that it has been impossible to secure such a resolution in the United Nations Security Council," said France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere on behalf of the resolution's sponsors, the United States, Britain, Belgium, Italy and Germany.

"We will therefore put on hold discussions on the resolution," he said after council consultations.

I think that's a great, albeit somewhat strange idea to set into motion. But a geek's got to be a geek - I'll see if I can make a translation as well one of the next days - that'll be one of my first attempts at expressing myself in latin.

Meanwhile, I have, not having read too much in to the text, a few comments:

'quod Russia opponitur' - I think it would be better to retain the syntactical structure of the English sentence and instead of another clause use an absolute ablative or instrumental ablative (in this case, the difference between the two are very vague) - Russia opponente, Civitates Foederatae ...

The 'adducat' sentence. I seemed to find little meaning in this, too many accusatives. I think i would be more proper, adduco being transitive, to have it read something like 'veritur ne consilium ab Europeis Americanisque compositum independentiam provinciae e Serbia.'

Also the word 'breakaway (province)' is completely missing. Perhaps 'tumultus'or 'inquies' would fit that description.

I guess it comes down to the lexical meaning of adduco, which I haven't looked up - thus I might be wrong.

Well, I guess we better look at the lexicon. I've certainly seen several instances of "adducere" with "ad."

On another note, I've been doing some reading on the whole Kosovo (an autonomous province of Serbia, the former Yugoslavia) issue, and it's quite interesting, though complicated. It certainly is a challenge to translate it into Latin, and I like a good challenge. I hope we can take it to the Agora.

I guess it comes down to the lexical meaning of adduco, which I haven't looked up - thus I might be wrong.

the construction is this aliquis aliquem ad aliquid adducit - someone leads another one to something. the ad may appear or not, but tis required by the original construction: lead the province to independence: priviciam ad independentiam. there were not "too many" acusatives: only two, one required by the verb, the opther by the preoosition - consilium is neuter nominative.